How to Use plutocracy in a Sentence

plutocracy

noun
  • If only the wealthy can afford to run for public office, are we more a plutocracy than a democracy?
  • Where their influence prevailed, the result was sometimes called plutocracy, or the rule of the rich.
    — Ron Elving, NPR, 1 Feb. 2025
  • Some of these cities are becoming hubs of the global plutocracy.
    — Emily Matchar, Smithsonian, 28 Apr. 2017
  • But in this case the opacity is obscuring the rise of a new American plutocracy.
    — Dana Milbank, The Denver Post, 18 Apr. 2017
  • But the MID isn’t just a symbol of housing policy falling prey to plutocracy.
    — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 14 May 2017
  • Social equity pits people with very little wealth and clout against the plutocracy that runs the world, with billions of dollars at stake.
    — Amanda Chicago Lewis, The New Republic, 4 Apr. 2022
  • In recent decades, as the stock market has soared, the vast fortunes amassed by some members of the plutocracy have largely escaped taxation.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 8 June 2021
  • One suspects that his problem with plutocracy isn’t its existence, but that membership in it didn’t save him when a fall guy was needed.
    — Laura Kipnis, The Atlantic, 10 Nov. 2022
  • The Roosevelts saved America from plutocracy and created a golden age for the middle class.
    — Robert D. Atkinson, The New Republic, 4 May 2018
  • And there are those who believe plutocracy is nothing new; America has always been ruled by an elite class, but through the decades she has marched, slow and steady, toward inclusiveness.
    — Time, 31 Aug. 2017
  • Even fiscal policy, or the deficit spending favored by the left, has at least the indirect effect of promoting a plutocracy.
    — Thomas Geoghegan, The New Republic, 18 Nov. 2020
  • But, almost as if to assist the cause, the plutes seemed this year to put on an extended exhibit of performance art whose plain, if unstated, thesis is that plutocracy is maybe a bad idea.
    — Anand Giridharadas, Time, 21 Nov. 2019
  • Can Trump marginalize those who question his plutocracy?
    — Dana Milbank, The Denver Post, 18 Apr. 2017
  • Can Trump marginalize those who question his plutocracy?
    — Dana Milbank, The Mercury News, 18 Apr. 2017
  • One school of progressive thought says that America has devolved (once again, perhaps) into a plutocracy.
    — Katherine Stewart, The New Republic, 11 July 2022
  • The battle against plutocracy isn’t going to be won in a single piece of legislation, certainly not one against which Manchin and Sinema hold an effective veto.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 1 Nov. 2021
  • In other words, has America finally become a full-fledged plutocracy, controlled by people of great wealth and income?
    — Letters To The Editor, The Mercury News, 18 July 2024
  • Mueller’s father was an executive at DuPont, part of a family firmly planted in the country’s plutocracy.
    — Marc Fisher, Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2018
  • Inequality is one of the biggest barriers to a functioning democracy: To turn around a slide into plutocracy, Democrats need to address the fact that two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck right now.
    — Clio Chang, The New Republic, 9 Jan. 2021
  • Once before, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, similar rhetoric about the dangers of plutocracy helped cement a Democratic majority that endured for decades.
    — Los Angeles Times, 29 Apr. 2021
  • Within 40 years, California had created a new plutocracy of Eloi, whose wealth exempted them from all worries about the mundane problems of the distant and despised Morlock others.
    — Victor Davis Hanson, Arkansas Online, 13 Sep. 2021
  • Democracy can flip into plutocracy if a single party accrues enough voting credits, which gets easier when voter turnout is low.
    — Joel Khalili, WIRED, 26 Jan. 2024
  • This odious walled vertical suburb is a civic embarrassment, the embodiment of a runaway plutocracy that places its own interests over the commonweal — and common decency.
    — Mark Lamster, Dallas News, 18 Dec. 2020
  • Disturbed by vanishing jobs, rising plutocracies, melting polar ice caps, not to mention numerous other serious threats to a good night's sleep and a reasonable life for future generations?
    — Deanna Isaacs, Chicago Reader, 22 June 2017
  • That way lies straightforward plutocracy, as those familiar with European social history will know.
    — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 4 Aug. 2020
  • Its point is that if this governing combination of executive chaos and legislative plutocracy continues apace, Democrats could see opportunity ripen in some of the unlikeliest of places.
    — Jim Newell, Slate Magazine, 22 May 2017
  • Before stadium building became another heartless money grab for the American plutocracy, Roy Hofheinz’s Astrodome was a genuine source of civic pride and national curiosity.
    — The Si Staff, SI.com, 28 Aug. 2019
  • Why is turning American democracy into a plutocracy so troubling?
    — Mordechai Gordon, Hartford Courant, 25 Dec. 2024
  • Many billionaires have additionally rigged economic policies in their favor by lobbying and in some cases, assuming government positions, known as a plutocracy, Rebekka Ayres argues in an op-ed for Teen Vogue.
    — Devika Rao, The Week, 26 Nov. 2022
  • Once among America’s most oppressed populations, her triumph is not only immune to interrogation, so is American plutocracy for having anointed her as its apostle.
    — Soraya Roberts, Longreads, 10 Aug. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'plutocracy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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